General interest items edited by Janice Flahiff

Springer’s SpringerLink science platform is now available in a free mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The app contains articles from over 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and chapters from 49,000 books, totaling over 5.4 million documents that span multiple areas of science, technology, and medicine.

Free content in the form of article abstracts, over 127,000 open access research articles, plus book and journal covers and other document details are included in the app. The SpringerLink app includes features like personalized notifications; “save” and “share” capabilities, including enabled sharing via email, Facebook, and Twitter; advanced search options; document details, including abstracts; and full-text views, which are available to institutional subscribers.

Springer publishes nearly 500 academic and professional society journals and is a part of the Springer Science+Business Media publishing group.

se of torture around the world has not diminished but the techniques used have grown more complex and sophisticated, according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London.

The study suggests that these emerging forms of torture, which include various types of rape, bestiality and witnessing violent acts, are experienced by people seeking asylum in the UK.

In many cases the techniques cause no visible effect but are responsible for a variety of serious mental health problems. The researchers say that their findings are vital for understanding what many asylum seekers have endured and for ensuring the correct medical treatments are available.

The majority of countries signed a UN convention banning all forms of torture almost thirty years ago but the new research joins a body of evidence showing that the use of torture not only persists but is also widespread.,,,

[Flahiff’s note: It is possible that many of these unpublished clinical trial results would have made a positive difference in many people’s lives. These unpublished results have the potential of aiding many researchers. They can prevent unnecessary duplicate trials, point to areas needing more research, and potentially provide groundwork for collaboration.

On another note, it is good to see that published research papers are now more accessible to all. As of 2008, research papers based on NIH grants must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) when those papers are accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. PMC will then make the papers freely available to the public within 12 months of publication.

I look forward to the day when all research papers are freely available to the public. There are a myriad of issues, as who pays for the publishing, the peer review process, and where the research papers should be “housed”. However, I believe the more scientific research results are disseminated in easily accessible format, the more we can advance in technology applications and filling in knowledge gaps.]

In a study that investigates the challenges of disseminating clinical research findings in peer-reviewed biomedical journals, Yale School of Medicine researchers have found that fewer than half of a sample of trials primarily or partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were published within 30 months of completing the clinical trial.

These findings appear in the January issue of the British Medical Journal, which focuses on the topic of unpublished evidence.

“When research findings are not disseminated, the scientific process is disrupted and leads to redundant efforts and misconceptions about clinical evidence,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, first author of the study and a Yale assistant professor of medicine. “Such inaction undermines both the trial in question and the evidence available in peer-reviewed medical literature. This has far-reaching implications for policy decisions, and even institutional review board assessments of risks and benefits associated with future research studies.”…

…

Ross said that there may be many reasons for lack of publication, such as not getting accepted by a journal or not prioritizing the dissemination of research findings. Still, he said, there are alternative methods for providing timely public access to study results, including the results database at ClinicalTrials.gov** that was created in response to Federal law.

Ask for assistance from a reference librarian at your local public, academic, hospital, or medical library.
Many academic, hospital, and medical libraries offer at least basic search help to all. Call ahead and ask
about their services. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Little things can be revealing in an interview, and a skilled interviewer can look beneath the surface to discover the real candidate

By Clif Boutelle, SIOP Public Relations

Selecting the right people to lead and build effective executive teams is critical to developing successful organizations, and the interviewing process can be the most important step.

Hiring ineffective leaders can lead to a variety of negative outcomes for an organization, including diminished morale and business performance. That’s why companies will often turn to executive selection experts like Dean Stamoulis, who heads the Global Executive Assessment Practice for New York City-based Russell Reynolds Associates.

He has conducted hundreds of interviews for top-level positions during the past 18 years. Employing his background in industrial-organizational psychology, he has the ability to delve beneath the superficial surface to determine the real substance and skills of candidates.

“What you see is not always what you get, and that’s why it is important to be able to provide a full assessment of a candidate including traits and characteristics not readily apparent in an interview or with provided background information,” said Stamoulis, who is author of Senior Executive Assessment: A Key to Responsible Corporate Governance.

He noted that too often interviewers become enamored with a charismatic candidate who makes a good first impression, instead of looking at relevant past performance and other indicators of leadership. It can work the other way as well. Some of the best executives do not make great first impressions. Looking deeper than the initial perception of a candidate can reveal skills needed for the position as well as leadership talents.

“Many interviewers truly do not focus on the key elements needed for the position,” Stamoulis explained. “It’s not that hard, but a lot of people don’t do it.”

One reason is that job descriptions are often too broad, he said. I-O psychologists can help organizations conduct a job assessment outlining the kind of skills needed for the position. They also possess the knowledge that can identify genuine leadership and personality traits of effective leaders and make valid predictions of likely success.

What are some of the traits Stamoulis looks for in candidates? There are many, he says, but certainly breadth of knowledge and attention are important. A full and rich conversation covering different facets of the business, including both the historical and sociological elements, shows breadth about the business.

For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one:

“Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.

Which one of the following statements is most likely?

(a) Bill plays in a rock band for a hobby.

(b) Bill is an accountant and plays in a rock band for a hobby.”

Most people will let their stereotypes about accountants rule and pick (b). But, in fact, we have no idea what Bill does for a living—he could be a politician, a concert pianist, or a drug dealer—so it’s more likely that only one random possibility, the rock band, is true, than that both (a) and (b) would happen to be true.

This line of research has suggested that people don’t use logic when making decisions about the world. But the truth is more complicated, De Neys says. When most people read a question like the one above, there’s a sense that something isn’t quite right. “That feeling you have, that there’s something fishy about the problem—we have a wide range of ways to measure that conflict,” De Neys says. For example, he has shown with brain imaging that when people are thinking about this kind of problem, a part of their brain that deals with conflict is active. “They stick to their gut feeling and don’t do the logical thing, but they do sense that what they are doing is wrong,” De Neys says.

De Neys thinks this sense, that something isn’t quite right with the decision you’re making, comes from an intuitive sense of logic. Other scientists have found that children start thinking logically very early. In one study, 8-month-old babies were surprised if someone pulled mostly red balls out of a box that contained mostly white balls, proof that babies have an innate sense of probability before they can even talk. It makes sense, De Neys says, that this intuitive sense of logic would stick around in adults.

This research deals with the basics of how we think, but De Neys says it may help explain more complex decision-making. If you want to teach people to make better decisions, he says, “It’s important to know which component of the process is faulty.” For example, if you want to understand why people are smoking, and you think it’s because they don’t understand the logic—that smoking kills—you might put a lot of energy into explaining how smoking is bad for them, when the actual problem is addiction. It’s a long way from a question about Bill’s career to understanding something like why someone decides to get married, for example; but research like this should help,” De Neys says.

His insurance company told him it would be covered 100 percent, with no copayment from him and no charge against his deductible. The nation’s 1-year-old health law requires most insurance plans to cover all costs for preventive care including colon cancer screening. So Dunphy had the procedure in April.

Then the bill arrived: $1,100.

The reason? During the procedure, polyps were found and rightfully removed. But in doing so, it changed the colonoscopy from a screening procedure to a diagnostic procedure, thus making it applicable to the patient’s deductible.

Such semantics are important, as insurance companies will seize them at every opportunity to pass on costs to both patients and hospitals….

About

This blog presents a sampling of health and medical news and resources for all. Selected articles and resources will hopefully be of general interest but will also encourage further reading through posted references and other links. Currently I am focusing on public health, basic and applied research and very broadly on disease and healthy lifestyle topics.

Several times a month I will post items on international and global health issues. My Peace Corps Liberia experience (1980-81) has formed me as a global citizen in many ways and has challenged me to think of health and other topics in a more holistic manner.

Do you have an informational question in the health/medical area?
Email me at jmflahiff@yahoo.comI will reply within 48 hours.

My professional work experience and education includes over 15 years experience as a medical librarian and a Master’s in Library Science. In my most recent position I enjoyed contributing to our library’s blog, performing in depth literature searches, and collaborating with faculty, staff, students, and the general public.

While I will never be be able to keep up with the universe of current health/medical news, I subscribe to the following to glean entries for this blog.

Krafty (Medical)Librarian,” a collection of writings from Michelle Kraft on items of interest to medical librarians. She tends to write on technology and medical libraries but she also writes about things in general on librarianship, medicine and health”